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H Mart opened an 80,000-square-foot Carrollton store in 2008
at 2625 Old Denton Road to… more

H Mart, a supermarket chain specializing in Asian products, plans to open its second Dallas-Fort Worth location, giving new life to a Plano shopping center that has had a key vacancy for nearly three years.

A subsidiary of New Jersey-based Hanahreum Group, H Mart signed a lease for a 72,267-square-foot anchor space in Parker Towne Centre in Plano. The company opened an 80,000-square-foot Carrollton store in 2008 at 2625 Old Denton Road.

H Mart opened an 80,000-square-foot Carrollton store in 2008
at 2625 Old Denton Road to… more

“It was our 23rd store that we opened, and we had no idea that there was such a high Asian population until we started to look into the area,” H Mart spokesperson David Shin said of North Texas.

Now the company plans to open a second location 15 miles away at K Avenue and Parker Road to accommodate growing demand. The Asian population in Dallas, Denton and Collin counties is 251,230, a 44 percent increase over the past decade, according to the 2010 Census.

Similar concepts have also noticed the population jump. In 2010, Buena Park, Calif.-based Tawa Supermarket Inc. opened 99 Ranch Market in Plano. The store is about 2 miles from the new H Mart location.

H Mart, which also has a Houston location, offers a food court and individual small storefronts inside of the store for such products as cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, said Cory McCord, director of leasing for Dallas-based Retail Plazas Inc., which owns and operates Parker Towne Centre.

“They have a large produce department. They have a large meat and fish department. They have a lot of exotic items,” McCord said. “It’s a unique format, and it draws from a wide range of ethnicities.”

Earl Harris, with the commercial retail division of The Weitzman Group, based in Dallas, handled negations of the H Mart lease. Sam Choi of Dallas Realty represented H Mart.

“This is going to drastically change the way the shopping center looks and the way it shops for years to come,” Harris said.

H Mart will likely open before Thanksgiving, McCord said. H Mart confirmed the location but declined to give details such as an opening date.

With the addition of H Mart, the shopping center went from 30 percent occupancy to 64 percent occupancy. The anchor space, formerly occupied by a Minyard Food Store, has been vacant since April 2009. The Weitzman Group started marketing the property in September.

“We had gone through the entire list of grocery store chains that are out there and even moved on to some other alternative uses, looking at some other options,” McCord said of trying to fill the space for the past three years.

Retail Plazas, which has owned the shopping center since 2005, hopes H Mart will make Super H Mart Towne Centre a multicultural destination, McCord said. Houston-based Fiesta Mart Inc. has a location across the street.

“There is certainly a strong Hispanic demographic up there, but H Mart has pegged this as a location that they feel that they can pull from a lot of the Asian neighborhoods in Plano and even Richardson and some of those areas,” McCord said. “They pull from a wide area.”

H Mart also draws other companies looking to take advantage of traffic, Harris said.

“This center worked for them because of the access to 75 and George Bush,” Harris said. “The spacing from this store and their store in Carrollton is perfect.”

After H Mart signed the lease, Harris spread the word at other Asian-focused shopping centers, such as H Mart’s current DFW location. “Just through word of mouth in the Asian community, we already have five proposals,” McCord said.